Tag Archives: National Company Law Appellate Tribunal

The Supreme Court of India is reported to have blessed a settlement between a litigating lender and a corporate borrower after the process for insolvency under the newly-legislated Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code had been set in motion.

The parties settled their differences and their settlement terms were approved setting aside the process, using the court’s powers under Article 142 of the Constitution. This is a material development and points to the need to take a close re-look at some of the policy choices made in the new bankruptcy law, which is now about nine months old.

First, the process brings on par with lenders, who may have thousands of crores in loans to a borrower, any operational creditor (say, supplier of furniture) who claims dues of just over a lakh of rupees, in the legal capacity to trigger the “resolution process” under the code. The grounds on which the National Company Law Tribunal might refuse to set the process in motion are limited — for operational creditors, the primary ground is the existence of disputes before the claim is made. In other words, only uncontested dues on which there is a default would lead to the bankruptcy law being attracted. The case in the Supreme Court was not of an operational creditor but of a financial creditor, but that does not matter for the analysis here.

Second, once the resolution process is set in motion, a moratorium kicks in. No debt can be enforced on the company against whom the claim was made. While this might seem normal about “bankruptcy protection” it works well only for companies that are truly bankrupt. For companies that are solvent but have bona fide disputes over claims made by counter parties, this results in a prompt trigger of pariah status. If your promises cannot be enforced against you, no one would transact with you. This is all the more reason for the setting of the process into motion to be done with a great deal of care and caution. Until a recent ruling by the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal, various benches of the National Company Law Tribunal, which administers the new law, had taken a position that unless actual litigation had been initiated, no claim of any operational creditor could be regarded as disputed.

Third, not only would a moratorium kick in, but also an “interim resolution professional” would stand vested with all the powers of the board of directors of the company. The powers of the board of directors would stand suspended forthwith. The moratorium and the change of control are certainly fantastic features to handle the best interests of stakeholders of a truly insolvent company but they are certainly poisonous and not medicinal for a company that is solvent but can be threatened with initiation of the resolution process. Therefore, the very threat of a possible initiation of this process leads to coerced recovery that could in fact hurt a larger segment of lenders, who truly have the long-term financial interests of the company at heart.

This is why HDFC Bank Managing Director Aditya Puri’s statement that resorting to the insolvency courts is not the best solution unless the borrower is a wilful defaulter makes immense sense. In his reported words, this is a law of “last resort” and not the “first thing”. The capacity of any goods or services provider — an operational creditor — to set such a serious process in motion as the first thing, is worrisome. Once the moratorium kicks in, even the financial creditors of a company for which a moratorium has kicked in, would get hit and be unable to recover their dues.

Indeed, the creditors’ committee that is supposed to work during the moratorium could comprise a majority of creditors, who see a future in the company and can drown out the voice of the lone creditor who does not. Therefore, theoretically, if one does call the bluff of an aggressive operational creditor or a disgruntled financial creditor, and stays the course, the initiation of the resolution process can eventually come to mean nothing. However, this is theoretical and not practical. Once the world at large rearranges its view of a company whose promises cannot be enforced and has to deal with a chartered accountant or company secretary acting as a resolution professional without experience in running a business, even a reasonable view of creditworthiness of a doubtful debtor has to change to a perception of a bad debtor.

In this context, the coding in the law that entails no roll-back once the resolution process is set in motion is a hard and blunt weapon of last resort, which can cause more injury than warranted when used as the first resort. When the Supreme Court uses Article 142 “for doing complete justice” and takes on record the settlement terms between a creditor, who has set the resolution process in motion and the debtor on whom a moratorium has kicked in, it is because really unjust and unintended consequences can emerge from the working of this law.

For the long-term health of the effectiveness of the bankruptcy law, it would have been better to help the new law build its core strengths by generating capacity and getting the resolution professionals and bankruptcy professionals to build bandwidth and gain competence before unleashing the burden of handling the entire society’s corporate debts on them. The burden of private corporate debt recovery could have been held back from imposing itself on the enforcement machinery until the immediate task of serious financial debts working itself through. The Supreme Court, which has powers to intervene and roll back a moratorium in the interests of justice, having used this power, it is time for a serious and quick rethink and pilot short amendments to make this law effective with a review scheduled for after two years.

This column was published in the Business Standard’s editions dated July 27, 2017 under the title Without Contempt

The question of whether the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) can dictate terms to a quasi-judicial tribunal that presides over enforcement of loan recoveries is making news, with the Gujarat High Court asking how the central bank had the powers to regulate tribunals. That the RBI believed it could dictate terms to a quasi-judicial body is not important. What is important — rather, scary — is how easily role clarity can officially get mistaken in the running of our public institutions.

The foundational blunder that embeds wrong policy choice into the DNA and blurs role clarity is the Presidential Ordinance that specially empowered the RBI to direct commercial banks on the action banks must take towards recovery of dues owed by borrowers. This is a classic example of a simplistic policy solution, which is an outcome of its authors presuming that everyone else before them had not been clever enough to see an obvious fix to a serious problem.

It is not the RBI’s job to take enforcement decisions for commercial banks. But having been given a cloak and a shining armour, the RBI perhaps came to believe that it could issue directions even to the National Company Law Tribunal on what it must do. Giving the RBI powers to direct banks on how to act under the newly-legislated Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code presumes that commercial banks were napping despite having been empowered by a new law. By vesting in the RBI the executive function of banks that it regulates, in other sectors, too, such interventions could follow. The insurance regulator could be asked to run insurance companies, the securities market regulator could be asked to operate mutual funds, and the pensions regulator may be asked to run pension funds.

Worse, the foundation has also been laid for vigilance agencies to knock on the doors of RBI officials, say, five years down the line, for bad decisions that were taken in the course of such enforcement. The banks’ problems will have become the RBI’s problems. This is a real possibility as the poor non-performing assets may provide next to no recovery, and buyers of some of these assets may make profits buying assets cheap — fertile ground for the Central Bureau of Investigation to say in the future that even the RBI has become tainted by corruption.

The RBI jumping in to notify a declaration on what the tribunal must do is also a replication of a classic policy choice in the past few years. The very creation of the National Company Law Tribunal, with powers to take serious judicial decisions such as award of damages as if it were a civil court, is based on the erroneous policy choice of creating new institutions to deal with problems that hurt the performance of existing institutions. Since justice administration is ineffective (due to myriad problems that cannot be reduced to populist reasons such as length of court vacations or lack of judges), successive governments have been getting Parliament to make laws empowering regulators to play the role of the judiciary. The requisite training and capacity building to discharge such roles are never invested in. Every disappointment with such experiments leads to even more egregious experiments, further blurring the lines of role clarity.

Examples abound. Sweeping powers given to capital markets regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India, despite being an executive organisation, to take serious quasi-judicial decisions without imparting judicial training, is a great example. Likewise, even the quasi-judicial tribunals that are being set up with serious responsibilities, face resource constraints. The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal is now empowered to play the role of an appellate tribunal not only for company law but also for competition law, as indeed in appeals from decisions under the new bankruptcy law. However, the tribunal has just two members — one is a retired Supreme Court judge, the other a retired officer from audit and accounts service. One seat is lying vacant. The Securities Appellate Tribunal has been empowered to hear appeals against decisions of the insurance regulator, but it took forever for the government to even complete appointments to achieve a full bench.

When the alleged scam in the telecom sector was making news, many “creative” policymakers advocated involving the Comptroller and Auditor General in executive decision-making before a decision is made, so that the auditor does not later find fault with propriety of decision-making. This was an example of how little inter-institutional checks and balances are appreciated and how easily they can get disrupted if the clamour for “change” gets loud enough to drown out reasoning. Getting the banking regulator to take decisions that regulated banks must take on their own is in the same vein.

It is highly possible that sometime in the near future, desperation over capacity constraints in “insolvency professionals” not being able to cope with the burden imposed on them under the new bankruptcy law could lead to the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India to being given powers to play the role of the professionals it regulates. Nothing could be a bigger blunder in the gestation of a nascent ecosystem. Such a measure would weaken the ecosystem of insolvency professionals, the same way commercial banks are being weakened today by having the RBI decide on their behalf how to handle bad loans.

In parallel, another role ambiguity is hurting the ecosystem. Under the new bankruptcy law, any operational creditor may initiate a “resolution process”, which, at the threshold, suspends the powers of the debtor’s entire board of directors, and imposes a moratorium on recovery of any dues from the debtor. The abuse of this provision has begun in earnest. Instead of servicing the financial creditors whose firefighting needs the system’s support, the enforcement system is being clogged with anyone claiming Rs 1 lakh or more being able to hold all the financial creditors to ransom, to extract a settlement by threatening a snowballing effect of a moratorium. The pain of having the moratorium presents a perverse incentive to small operational creditors who can derail the financial creditors’ engagement with complex decisions, which can involve weighing recovery, enforcement, revival strategies and exit planning, all at once. Clearly, overzealous knee-jerk policy is only going to cause more problems, far from solving existing problems.

This Without Contempt column was published in the editions of Business Standard on July 13, 2017